I’m trying to track down the first printed use of the word technique in English. Can anyone tell me the name, author, and date of the publication in question? It would be especially valuable, on top of that, to have an excerpted passage containing the word, in order to infer its intended meaning from its context.

2 Answers
2

The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect
control over the resources of his native language, had almost
wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and
illogical phrases, at once hackneyed, and fantastic, which hold so
distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and
will, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius,
unless the attention has been specifically directed to their
worthlessness and incongruity.

That in fact is OED 1's earliest citation; the current online (by subscription) edition may have something earlier. However, the word techic (or technick) is cited in 1600; as this suggests, it may be relevant to OP's purpose.
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StoneyBOct 8 '12 at 23:47

Same in the OED Third Edition, updated September 2009.
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HugoOct 9 '12 at 4:59